On a Friday afternoon, I thought a few hours schedule free meant a stroll through a line of shops, sourcing Kona coffee, and a mystery book found at our modern dime-store called Longs Drugs. Yet parenting includes surprises on the daily—as in the movie was rated R.

Good bye free time, hello watching Deadpool and Wolverine. More than a few times in my contemporary life, plenty culture signifiers occur at once. While I approach turning 60 soon, I also remain lesbian and white and a Mama. My 13-year-old son is a mixed race Black and Caucasian youth. Synthesizing from complex cultures often gives pause, so I am asking—wait, what is going on?

Standing at the ticket counter to purchase just one ticket for the 8th grader in our family, since the 15 year old friend he brought has funds, the Regal Keahou Kona movie theater clerk reminded me, spontaneously. An R rating requires minors be accompanied by an adult and so I stumbled into purchasing a large popcorn (some for the teens and mostly for the Mama, prioritizing and all) and mumbled the serenity prayer on acceptance, especially for scheduling snafus.

Carrying this sentiment, I took softly-carpeted, careful strides into the movie theater. What was I in for and are any of my signifiers prep enough? The rest was standing at the train track returning the friendly multiverse conductor's wave, trusting the journey, and bidding adieu to my original plan: window shopping, quality caffeine-ing, and a lousy, therefore, oh so good, mystery noveling. Hypothetically purchased at a simulacra dime store, true, yet I can turn on a dime, as most single parents learn after a decade and counting into the process.

Snug in my movie theater seat on one side, the two chaperoned youth are sitting far away (where else?) in the bleacher seats. A few minutes before, I commiserated with the gray-haired woman prepping the popcorn at the concession stand. She was listening well to my request for plenty butter and standing before her, I imagined that she understood how high caloric popcorn might assist my cognitive dissonance. Allies appear unexpectedly and everywhere in the zone of metaphysical chaos.

During the 20 minutes of movie trivia and film trailers, I felt ready. Bring it, I self-coached in my elastic waistband Mama jeans. As I age I'm caring less, or not one iota, if others also hear my audibly public chuckles. I hear my own life laughter and that be a poetic justice dynamic. When we laugh, at what, for why, and how long remains one of life's core popping mystery kernels: wait, what is going on, we ask and laugh some. Cackles are meta because they can be brief howls, quiet shouts, preemptive tears, and curiosity signals as in que pasa or say what?

If you think of a temporary office cubicle, one wall 90-degree cornered to the back wall and the same angling on the right side, these three imaginary walls are a movie set symbolically. The fourth wall is where the camera rests looking upon the scene. Movie characters seldom if ever stare directly at the fourth wall because that is where you and I sit behind the camera in this make-believe movie theater world. For characters to address the fourth wall—that is, speak to us directly is to crash the illusion—which Wolverine does in the opening seconds of the movie.

Notice I did not write minutes or half way through—the first few seconds of the movie is Wolverine dropping f-bombs at us for our errant ways in keeping cell phones on. Quite the tirade we receive. I had already turned my phone completely off, so I labeled the character's response as excessive and thus fantastic. Titrating the outrageous or effective cinematic dosages is a movie goal.

I have never attended a movie where the fourth wall is broken so quickly. Way to go Deadpool and Wolverine. His friend Deadpool's response to the tirade is to hush him, advising not to scare away we good folks sitting here. Then the two walk off screen and the “real” movie begins.

The movie makes fun of how old-school movies—those not breaking the fourth wall—are limited on really good cinema fun. Deadpool relies on the fourth wall to share commentary: gee whiz, isn't this cool that theater audience and stage actors and story lines are all participating together? Why not provide instantaneous meta comments through and through? Be right here, right now, movie audience. The actual movie story runs parallel to Deadpool's fourth wall antics—two movies for the price of one.

Another experiential dimension was me listening carefully to audience laughter. Probably a hundred people sitting near and around me in this movie theater, and so I began learning. In one early scene Deadpool drops into a barren desert where bits and pieces, remnants of modern life, protrude through sand dunes. We have a three-dimensional concrete sign for 20th Century Fox jutting in the sand. The audience laughed loud, clear, and long at this visual. Yet I was quiet. Wait—what is going on? Seems mainstream culture finds symbolic demise of 20th Century Fox amusing.

And that is the point of this writing (must I have one?). Many times my laugh register does not happen parallel with others in the room. And I'm curious about that.

For example, after the movie, during the one hour commute returning to our Hawai'i countryside house, the teenager youths sat in the back; I was still going for free time or at least having space to myself. And I heard a few curt laughs happening over Taylor Swift's song “Shake It Off.” My son's friend snickered, “Why make a song that says you don't care what people say. Just don't care. No song necessary,” he laughed.

After a quiet pause, one of the teenagers asked what I thought of Taylor Swift. She gets my full respect, right away, I start with a conclusion. How many 15 year old white female youth decide early in life to commit 100 percent to the music business? Swift signed with Sony at 15 and today at 34 appears to keep momentum. Whether I select to listen to her music, or not, does not diminish my respect for her courage and perseverance. A white female entrepreneur in a competitive music world, expecting the lambasting that industry naysayers often reserve for an ambitious woman, and she makes the leap, anyway. Takes faith, I conclude, again, after a few minutes explaining what I think, in a car that got very quiet. Listening at work.

What I hear next in the car rings unusual—more quiet. Mocking laughter dropped for a short while. I guess that is where the difference on laughter often exists. My laughter vote is for genuinely clever content evoking subtle sensory, symbolic language and unusual visual dynamics. The youth's sarcastic laugh at Taylor Swift compares to Deadpool's having a laugh through the fourth wall at a movie's actual narrative. Yet each of these laughs are far removed from authentic content. This is the world of glib social media commentary. And I don't find that funny. Too much is at stake.

Not a coincidence that the movie Deadpool and Wolverine targets, as one audience, a youth market for the shared language is, hey, aren't we cool and hip inside this shared language pool? We get each other, don't we? I suppose what shifts the conversation into having stakes at all—for the world of silly imagination is one I value—is that the laughter pivots on how women are perceived. Taylor Swift from the traditional male gaze—hetero and white—can appear like a frivolous performer, all scantily clad performing to mass popularity. Yet the deal is that she gets this.

She has gone fourth wall on her own predictable image. And that is why—from my perspective—she wrote “Shake It Off,” to clearly signal that she gets the meta-commentary about her work in the music industry. She went meta on others' meta and that compares to breaking the fourth wall. Many of her songs adopt this POV. The youth are laughing with Deadpool because he is the cool hip guy while these same youth laugh at Taylor Swift, for there goes another wacky female doing her thang. Meaning that the difference of laughing with and laughing at often pivots on whether the source is male or female.

I don't think I have quite met the extent of wacky that Deadpool portrays in this movie; he is all over the place and as the movie ends, I had had enough. Still laughing, yet a half-volume fatigued laugh, as in appreciating any creative effort even if kinda lame over the course of several hours; still, the theater audience and I had shared a few similar laugh tracks.

For example, while the song “Lady in Red” is blaring, the camera holds still on a medium shot. The focus is a low hill, void and clear of any characters yet booming music continues. Voila, up and over the hill scrambles the world's ugliest small dog—bulging eyes, strange white hair tufts, erratic bald spots, and a protruding tongue that never retreats. Deadpool has discovered his lady in red and smitten is an understatement. This relationship governs the rest of the movie in key ways.

That Deadpool falls for a dog so wholeheartedly yet fails to communicate with the woman he loves, continues stereotypic portrayals of cinema women. We have femmefatale or flimsy accessory. For lesbian graphic novelist Alison Bechdel's question whether we see on the movie screen two women having an authentic conversation on a topic other than men, the score for Deadpool and Wolverine earns a zero on a scale of one to ten. (A Black woman in a suit I thought surely has influence yet she's reduced to a smarmy scene going for the comedy-effect white guy.)

If we accept the movie as superficial violent comedy then all is well. Yet if we accept that cinema has influence on minds and emotions—especially impressionable youth—then one consequence might be that after watching two hours of violent male mayhem, where women are mostly absent, perhaps making fun of a female musician was the cultural permission the movie had given the teens?

One theme encouraging a coherent movie narrative does ask what is most meaningful in Deadpool's life? When the movie begins, he is a car salesman, often challenged to sell a few, and living a routine life. After work one day, he returns to a surprise birthday party his friends throw him. A photo taken at the celebration shows nine friends enjoying the good life.

While the rest of the film is ongoing violent corpse mayhem, slashing and burning the narrative forward, Deadpool carries this one vulnerable photo. He tells Wolverine that his friends are the reason for living and when Wolverine attempts to continue his lonely, alcohol-drinking life when the film ends, Deadpool convinces him to show up for a social event where all the friends reunite at a boisterous, joyful dinner party.

At this soiree seated next to Wolverine is Deadpool, obliviously holding the ugly-dog while a woman who loves him, and he loves her, sits blithely on the other side. She can't reach him. Wolverine says, “Give me the dog. Talk to the girl.” In reality she is a grown woman and her few lines in the entire film are the catalyst for all the “jokes” and violence, slapstick and otherwise. She wants him to open up more fully and be real with her. He insists he is but has a few hundred bloody murders to achieve, first. She leaves him yet the movie's ending constructs a story line that the two can reunite (Hollywood wins again). All the fourth wall antics, all the violence theatrics arrive to the universe of who means the most to us.

Besides Deadpool's girlfriend, the few cameos she gets, are a few women given glimpses of screen time, insignificant to the movie continuing though. Except that is for the femmefatale enacting supple fingers to literally enter a person's mind, mostly the men, for retrieving conscious thoughts on insecurity, worry, and fear. She is a thought-stealing dominatrix, power-driven to rule all the universes. Approaching her goal successfully she is until Deadpool and Wolverine save the heroic day from the female menace. The entire movie pivots around her evil intentions (survival instincts, women might say) and how will the men save the multiverses from her?

Younger and white and bald she operates an outlaw refugee settlement with a singular purpose to allay a ghost-like dragon showing up daily for feedings, often dining on human beings in a few gobbles. When a film omits women the absence says enough and when a movie portrays a woman through vitriolic sexist language the message gives up the fourth wall gimmick and goes directly for story content: this woman will be hated on through character monologue.

The violent-language character is a mayhem adventurer sidekick. When he meets the femmefatale, Deadpool repeats the language for her and she zaps the guy dead into firey embers. When the movie is over, and the credits have scrolled for a while, Deadpool arrives on screen one last time. He does so to clear his name. He hadn't made up that language and gotten his friend killed. We have a flashback to when the guy actually did say the words, so the movie plays the offensive language—twice. How funny.

Deadpool and Wolverine’s coterie of femmefatales.

True enough I laughed often during this movie, and taking a few careful steps exiting the theater into tropical air, adjusting from brisk air-conditioning, the teenage youth were watching me. What did I think, my son asked right away. Applauding the clever whimsical of the ongoing melee of violence and goofy and what-the-hell-is-going-on, I was glad that life's serendipity brought me into the film watching moment. Laughter is always the balm, I feel.

And yet inside our family car and returning home, when the Taylor Swift question surfaced, a few click-click-click connections ran through my mind. The laughter at her was a continuation of the movie's take on women. That's what's at stake. How are our youth adhering to cultural messages, often misogynistic, that play for jokes? In a way, we simply have the good old boys club, excluding and mocking women as they go, just modernized to portray hipsters Deadpool and Wolverine as if heroic.

Ultimately, doesn't the reel to real impact how our teenagers perceive women? At the end of the day, I'm no prude despite my elastic waistband Mama jeans. Just that I don't find stereotyping, dehumanizing, omitting, and diminishing women as funny. Suppose that might be why I'm not laughing in the theater when the mainstream audience is.